Add My Voice

A social media post with a video of a person encountering an alarm set off by the individual’s presence at a neighborhood Church, reminded me of the question I wondered about many years ago: Why is the Church that honors the teachings of Jesus Christ, locking its doors to the people who are lost and who perhaps prayed to Jesus to help them find shelter in the freezing temperatures? If fear of the unknown or a lack of support in the middle of the night creates an environment that requires locking the doors of a church, it is understandable, but it is not in sync with the message of the faith. A person praying to find emergency shelter at a church in the middle of the night might also be afraid in the dark, freezing, and unknown parts of the city. The person may have escaped a horrific situation, but does not yet have the necessary skill set to survive.
I prayed in hopes of understanding why a place of worship representing a non-profit entity as a church, and in particular in the Gospel of Christ, would lock the doors to the house for community prayer. Perhaps the historical importance of its contents, such as the works of Michelangelo, 1475-1564, as the Sistine Chapel, and the Vatican, a City and an Independent State, who has 2000 years or more of artifacts and recorded knowledge of divine and human faith and studies of medicine from around our planet in its library, might warrant a lock and alarm system. The gift of viewable historical art and information for the general public helps people understand their legacy, review its human evolution, and their own society; whether they are tribal humans on the planet, metropolitan city humans, or space exploration humans, the Museum and some churches preserve important historical information and traditions. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ genealogy libraries contain information about historical people. I learned about Chief Sequoyah and his creation of the Cherokee Syllabary, its written language, at one of them.

On another road in the same city, a congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses built a church over one weekend; like an old-fashioned barn raising, the carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and cooks brought everything over on a Friday Night. They hammered their structure into place, and by Sunday, they had their Church, The Kingdom Hall, with functioning lights, filled with people for a sermon, visible from the sidewalk on an evening walk.
On one afternoon walk, I noticed another beautiful church. I had driven by it many times, but on a walk, different things came into view. I walked up to the door, which displayed its hours of available sermons, and found it locked. The exterior design looked like a small city cathedral. The interior is unknown. In another part of the same city, higher up on a hill, and at the end of a rocky driveway, stands a church with modest exterior walls. Once inside the building, the beauty of all the Nature surrounding this Church was framed by walls, half of which were made entirely of windows. The Father/Priest reminded us of Jesus Christ’s teachings as we viewed the world of Mother Nature through the windows.
Faith and Community seem plentiful, considering that on a straight stretch of about 5.3 miles of road, there are 12 churches, three of which are Baptist. The other nearby churches represent the Pentecostals, the Messiah Lutheran, the Methodists, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and several other Churches of Christ. The Peace Presbyterian Church is open 24 hours a day. Just doing the research for this can lead to more research about the similarities and differences between the Catholic Church, the Church of England, the Protestants, Episcopalians, Evangelicals, and Anglicans, and there is so much information about religion, religious practices, and faith. This information is just a small portion of the neighborhood churches on roads. There are many other churches and denominations in the city, but this road in my old hometown piqued my curiosity about the churches. The social media post about the person seeking shelter who set off the alarms just by trying to open the door reminded me of the questions I had about the purpose of community churches.